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Political and Military Posts on Hammock Forums

Published on 03-15-2014 03:22

Hammock Forums has always had a strict rule against political and religious posts. This has normally applied to issues that most members can agree are contentious...gun rights and carry laws, differences in religion, political elections and candidates, etc. As we've said several times, this isn't about First Amendment rights but about keeping this particular site respectful and on-topic.
As the site has grown, however, other topics have begun to generate more political posts...particularly the military appreciation threads. I'm a veteran and I've volunteered to deploy again this summer, so I appreciate the support on a personal level as well as a patriotic level. However, the military's role in society and the proper level of support for its members are certainly political viewpoints. In the past, most HF membership was American and had similar views on the topic, so we had no contentious threads about it. Today, we have a growing international membership and a wider array of political opinions.

If we allow HF members to post support for the military, it would only be fair to let the differing opinions be posted as well...and that would quickly degenerate into political discussion, and probably result in a heated and emotional thread that would spill over into the other subforums (as we experienced on whiteblaze.net before starting this site). Since HF's mission is to provide a friendly community to discuss hammocks, discussion of the military detracts from our primary objective. From this point forward, we will consider threads about the military to be political in nature, and will remove them accordingly.

As I've said several times in similar posts, such policies are not geared toward restricting anyone's freedom of speech, and they're not made from any sense of political correctness. We started HF to discuss hammocks and we plan to maintain that singular focus as much as possible. All of Hammock Forums' mods are in agreement - no matter what we think about the military or its members, HammockForums.net is not the proper place to discuss it. Please cooperate with this new policy.